Wednesday, May 20, 2015

yardage.info

I routinely find myself in fabric stores, ogling yards of bolts of fabric, and more often than not will buy some without a clear idea of a project. I used to buy just one yard, but then through practice, found that one yard wasn't enough for a lot of the projects I wanted to make. Now I'm up to 1.5 or 2 yards, depending on the cost.

Last year, I had an idea for a little web application where one could estimate how much fabric would be necessary to do different projects–an on-the-go fabric shopping aid, if you will. I registered a domain and never really got around to building anything until this past weekend.

You can select different categories, and various project characteristics will pop up to give a slightly more accurate estimate. Right now it's heavily focused on women's clothing; eventually I'd like to include menswear and accessories.

yardage.info is designed to be viewed easily on a smartphone, though it should look perfectly fine on your desktop or tablet, too.

This is still a work in progress, and the estimations are purely based on my own experience. I tried to get some empirical data by going through my patterns, but have yet to figure out an effective way to do that.

I've got some code in there which will convert from imperial to metric, but have yet to hook it up to the visible interface. (For the more technically inclined, the code is viewable here!)

I'd also like to add an ability to take into account stripes or directional patterns, and also to change the width: right now it assumes a 44" or 45" wide fabric, since I'm trying to provide a slight overestimate. Always better to have too much fabric than too little, I say!

And here is the view I had all weekend, as we each worked on a personal coding project. Lots of nerd love in this house!

Go ahead and check out yardage.info! I would be ecstatic if it proved to be a useful tool to sewists over time, and I sincerely hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed making it.